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First SSD [840 EVO] - Am I Missing Something?

C

Chaddie

n00b
Joined
Jul 6, 2014
Messages
11
So, I recently purchased a "Samsung 840 EVO MZ-7TE250BW". The first SSD I've ever used. I upgraded from a very dated SATA HDD that is rated for about 40-50mb speeds and had been running the same Windows 7 install for over four years. So, I was expecting to be blown away by this new drive. However, I'm just confused and I'm wondering if I'm missing something, or if not, then what is with all the glowing reviews and hype over SSDs. Especially this one.

I bought the drive because I was getting tired of very long save times when working on art/modeling projects and was under the (false?) impression that a solid state drive surely would provide way faster speeds, but it doesn't... at all. I've run a lot of tests on different setups with different HDDs and this SSD just barely pulls ahead in some of them. Boot time is 26 seconds with the SSD which is about twice as fast as my basic HDD I'm testing against which is a 320GB WD Blue Series (WD3200AAKS). But outside of that there's nearly no performance increase in anything; programs start at the same speeds, and file saves take the exact same times on the SSD as the old drive.

Meanwhile, spec-wise everything matches up. Samsung Magician reads speeds of over 2 GB/s read and over 1 GB/s write (RAPID enabled). ATTO shows nearly the same. The other drive by comparison has up to 115mb/s writes and 120mb/s reads. The drive is properly in AHCI mode on SATA3 and I've tried various optimizations to improve speeds. All the numbers seem to be in order but I'm just not seeing anything, really, outside of faster boot times. Which I honestly don't care about at all. Every drive I've tested has been running a completely new install of Windows 7 64bit from DVD.

Even coming from my original HDD with the 40/50mb/s speeds I'm not seeing much of a change in anything, shouldn't I? I just keep second-guessing myself because everywhere I look it seems everyone is so impressed with this drive. I was about to give up and just sell the thing but I figured I'd try asking people that would know far better than myself. Certainly didn't pay this much just to get a boot time that's 26 seconds faster. For the price I could have got a much nicer CPU that would probably have benefited me more.

Here are my hardware/software specs that should be useful:

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
HDD: WD3200AAKS (Windows experience score of 5.9)
SSD: Samsung 840 EVO MZ-7TE250BW 2.5" 250GB (score of 7.9)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H
CPU: 3.0GHz AMD Phenom 2 x4 945
RAM: 8GB 1333MHz

Thanks to anyone who bothered to read through all that. I just want to know if I'm being stupid and missing something simple or if I'm just better off getting a new processor instead.
 
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You're saying the drive benches fine but it's no faster in ordinary use?

I hate to ask the dumb question but... are you sure you're not running programs from the HDD or something like that?

Something definitely seems odd.
 
So you ran Samsung Magician and wrote those speeds but I don't see any details about what it is that isn't faster...

Software you're using, File Size(s) your dealing with, exact durations on loads and saves...
 
Wow, wasn't expecting responses that fast.

Benchmarks seem on target, yes. I could be missing something in reading them, though. At the moment I can't do benchmarks on the SSD again or I would have included screenshots. I can certainly post them if the exact numbers will be helpful. (Will need to reinstall an OS onto it). In all my tests I had only the one drive hooked up, so yes, absolutely no chance anything was being run on any drive other than what I expected.

For file-saving I was dealing with files ranging from 80mb to 300mb. Two main programs I use are Paint Tool SAI and Blender. I can't give exact times down to the millisecond since I timed them with a stopwatch, but there's certainly no noticeable difference.

Saves out of SAI take ~ 6 seconds for 232mb on every drive setup including my old 40-50mb drive..

Saving a 1.85 million tri sphere in Blender takes nearly 3.4 seconds everywhere. a 2TB WD Green Series drive actually beat it by a second in one test.

Otherwise nothing else seems faster at all. All programs I've tried start in the exact same times. Installs seem to take the same amount of time as well. I know these tests certainly are not well-done but I can definitely tell there's no real change, maybe a little here and there.

If anyone has suggestions on what to try or how to test it I'll give it a go. Seems to me I'm probably CPU-bound in everything. I'm just surprised to see no performance gain from an SSD. My CPU certainly isn't THAT bad.
 
My suggestion is to use Windows Resource Monitor to identify the actual bottleneck on the save. If you're not seeing app startup increases, that's a little strange. The save could be bottlenecked by CPU or RAM. Finally, as some other people pointed out, are you very sure that you are not still using a non-SSD for some app data? Did you adjust your windows performance settings after installed the SSD? What are your swap file settings?
 
Chaddie said:
Seems to me I'm probably CPU-bound in everything. I'm just surprised to see no performance gain from an SSD. My CPU certainly isn't THAT bad.
Click to expand...

No, but it is 5 years old.


Just curious, when you say things like:
a 2TB WD Green Series drive actually beat it by a second in one test.
Click to expand...

Are you saying when you ran the test on a 2TB drive you have, it was 1 second slower? or you ran the test with your SSD and looked up the score of the 2TB on the internet.
 
I'll give that a try and see what it turns up. Absolutely sure of where everything was being run from. By swap file I assume you're referring to the Windows pagefile? If so, I originally tried it at the default install settings, which I forget.. I think it's the size of RAM? I also let Samsung Magician resize it in the OS Optimizations settings later on which sets it to a minimum of 100mb and a max of 1GB.

I also realize now that I never installed the firmware update for the drive. That's worth a try I'd assume. I'll get a fresh Win7 install on it soon and post actual data instead of my bad memory of numbers.

And a new reply as I'm writing this one. I'm used to never hearing from people when I post on forums, thanks a ton for responding, everyone.

Saving from blender took nearly 3.4 seconds in every setup with exception of the 2TB Green drive where it actually saved nearly a second faster, around 2.7 seconds.

For what it's worth I also played around with RAM disks at the time and still saw no significant changes at all in running stuff off of them.
 
Can you reassure us that you really are saving to the SSD? I'm not at all familiar with SAI or Blender but I see a comment online somewhere that "By default, SAI will save to your documents". In Win7, that should mean the Documents folder which is, by default, in:
C:\users\(your user name)\Documents
I'd like to make sure that the SSD drive is the C:\ drive and that your Documents folder isn't a symbolic link to the old hard drive or something - that the Documents folder is in fact on the SSD.
 
I would also want to confirm that you are running this on a full SATA III 6 Gbps connection and that it is set to AHCI in the BIOS to take full use of your speeds. It is not a matter of overhype, you should be seeing consistent read and writes in the 400-500 MB range depending on your controller. Something in your configuration is incorrect and with the little information it's hard to tell what. Start with the basics, connection and BIOS at AHCI. Also run Samsung's software and it will provide some basic diagnostic and configuration info as well as can run scripts to properly adjust some registry items.
 
BillytheSkids said:
I would also want to confirm that you are running this on a full SATA III 6 Gbps connection and that it is set to AHCI in the BIOS to take full use of your speeds. It is not a matter of overhype, you should be seeing consistent read and writes in the 400-500 MB range depending on your controller. Something in your configuration is incorrect and with the little information it's hard to tell what. Start with the basics, connection and BIOS at AHCI. Also run Samsung's software and it will provide some basic diagnostic and configuration info as well as can run scripts to properly adjust some registry items.
Click to expand...

All of that is already covered in the OP.
 
evilsofa said:
All of that is already covered in the OP.
Click to expand...

That's my mistake, don't know how I missed it or forgot it. Then I'm with you evilsofa, it has to be writing to the platter drive to limit the speeds so dramatically. With 3D modeling everything is backwards as well, tests have shown that installing OS and application onto platter and saving to SSD provides better performance then the more traditional way. Also pure processor speed is very important so on a side note I'd look into boosting that 945. I took my 965 to 4Ghz and made renders WAY faster.
 
I'm testing individual drives. Right now I'm down to two different setups, I've tried many others but there was no point continuing to try and deal with all of them. The SSD is the only drive in the SSD setup. Just as the 320GB is the only drive in the HDD setup. It would be impossible to write to a HDD that is not physically connected in any way in the SSD setup and vice-versa.

The drive is connected and configured properly as far as I can possibly tell. I was mistaken about the firmware. The reason I didn't update it was because it was already up to date. I've just done another fresh install of Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit and ran a plethora of tests.

Samsung Magician:
Normal: 540 MB/s Read | 507 MB/s Write | Random Read: 40,501 IOPS | Random Write: 38,866 IOPS
RAPID: 2947 MB/s Read | 2,439 MB/s Write | Random Read: 88,143 IOPS | Random Write: 51,477 IOPS

Not sure where to upload screenshots but ATTO seems on-target as well. In RAPID mode, though, the write speeds average around 200MB/s while the reads skyrocket to 2.1 GB/s. Regardless of that it should still be much faster than the HDD setup.

I downloaded PassMark AppTimer to test program start times but I have no idea how reliable it really is.

Blender:
SSD Normal: 0.6390
SSD RAPID: 0.2961
HDD: 0.378

Firefox:
SSD Normal: 0.890
SSD RAPID: 0.5624
HDD: 0.6244

Paint Tool SAI:
SSD Normal: 0.1714
SSD RAPID: 0.1557
HDD: 0.1709

So, my HDD setup shows better speeds than the SSD in non-RAPID mode. Which, makes no sense. Nor am I really sure what exactly it's measuring since those are not real-world times. In reality everything takes about 2 seconds to start whether I'm on my SSD setup or my HDD setup, there is no noticeable difference at all.

File Save Test - Saving a 263mb file from SAI:
SSD Normal: 5.1 seconds
SSD RAPID: 5.2 seconds
HDD: 6.0 seconds

So, at least that one makes more sense.

File Save Test - Saving a 1.85 million tri. sphere from Blender:
SSD Normal: 3.0 seconds
SSD RAPID: 3.4 seconds
HDD: 2.8 seconds

Note, again, these were timed manually. However, I did them many times to confirm as accurate a result as I could.

I can copy files on the SSD to the SSD with the bench-marked speeds, though. Copying 256mb of data on the SSD was instant while on the HDD it took 2-3 seconds. Extracting is another story, though. Extracting a 190mb .rar file took 12 seconds on SSD and 7 seconds on the HDD. I used the exact same files for each test. Overall it does seem the SSD has faster speeds in most of the tests but only significantly in one, which is direct copying. These tests still are not perfectly done, I'm sure. But, it doesn't really matter when I clearly don't see any real changes in normal use.

I have tried testing these same things by under-clocking and over-clocking and actually did see significant changes. I'm positive my CPU is at fault for the slowness in most things. I am really surprised that the SSD still just performs the same as any HDD I've used in most things. I've read many reviews of people putting these drives in old systems and getting major speed ups. I guess I was just expecting the wrong results. Not really sure whether it's worth it to keep trying and hoping I missed something or just give up on it. Money should have gone towards a better CPU.
 
I could see it if we were talking about CPU-bound processes. And maybe Blender saving files is a CPU-intensive task. But I don't see how extracting a rar file is going to be half as slow just because the target disk is an SSD. Unless the Samsung Magician software is just screwing everything up (I hate that kind of software running in the background).

Are you running the latest BIOS (FF)? It does show an update to the SATA controller.
 
Arcygenical said:
Are you using AHCI mode, full reinstall etc.?
Click to expand...

OP already says yes to both of these. However it really does sound like a case of not having AHCI selected.

Something is most definately funky. There's no way in hell a 5400RPM HDD is writing faster than a SSD.
 
Chaddie said:
Seems to me I'm probably CPU-bound in everything. I'm just surprised to see no performance gain from an SSD. My CPU certainly isn't THAT bad.
Click to expand...

Probably.

By default Windows caches writes to the disk. If they're small files (let's say under 1GB but it really depends on how much available memory your system has) they'll be cached in memory, then when available, the cache will be flushed to the disk, completely transparently. To you, it will appear that the file was written to disk and opening it immediately after it's been 'saved' works too, but Windows is smart enough to know that if it hasn't been written to disk, it'll read the data from memory.

Because of all that, small (in both size and quantity) write operations probably won't get any speed benefit. Large files/multiple operations will, as will reads.

As to why there's no difference in speed, it's most likely because saving files (at least in your case) is heavily dependent on the CPU speed. The file takes time to create because of all the calculations the CPU has to do to convert whatever's in the program's memory to a format the program can export (and subsequently import). That can include things such as data compression, data conversion, etc.

Without a CPU upgrade, computation-heavy tasks will not see any speed increases.

But you already know that the SSD works because booting is far faster. Reading reading thousands small of files is what SSDs excel at.
 
I would run the test to make sure that there is really that much deviation. I also think that people tend to mistakenly think that if you through more hardware at a system it will run that much better. Not a great example but I was working with one of the engineers at my company and he has this process that compiles a project that he was working with. The process took 10 minutes or so on QC+HT i7M, 8GB of ram, and a 7200RPM WD scorpio black. He was complaining about performance and was talking about just buying his own SSD to put into the drive. I looked at his resource usage. 1 CPU core was at 25%, almost 0 page file usage, and the hard drive wasn't doing any work. The memory usage for the app was only like 250MB. I warned him that it wouldn't be worth it, but at $100 and then having a 500GB HDD that he could pop into an external case it was worth it anyways. Sure enough the job and whatever the software was doing didn't go any quicker with the SSD. There wasn't a single hardware reason that the process wasn't going quicker.

My guess is and specially when you are talking seconds that their is more than just committing the file to disk and that its less drive performance and more about how that task was written within the application.
 
The biggest misnomer with SSD's is that the huge sequential speed that you seen in synthetics translates to real world performance boost.

The reality is the primary improvement you see with SSD's is OS snappiness in terms of windows populating and such. The immediate change on a freshly installed system is subtle, but after 6 months if you go back to an HDD in your system the improvement from the SSD becomes much more apparent.
 
Well from my experience in 3D modeling, opening (reading) and closing (writing) were vastly improved going to my 840 EVO, 990FX, Phenom II x4 965. Use, rendering, manipulating in 3D space were intensive at the time of creating the models, but once it's generated and is saving it was pure write speed. Also if you look at the numerous articles on the line you can see how saving to SSD is a bigger boost then OS and application running off of an SSD. Hate to claim bad drive, but if you've tried everything and are certain it's not a configuration, maybe?
 
i'm having performance doubts with 840 EVO's as well, see my older thread somewhere here. I upgraded from 830 drives, and I got less than half the performance with my write instensive applications. Coincidence?
 
Updated my BIOS to the newest, retried some stuff, only thing worth noting is that .rar extraction is now the same as my HDD, as it should be. Not sure why I would have seen such a slower time previously, could be the BIOS update? I also disabled Samsung Magician and saw no benefits. I would agree that I don't think the SSD itself is bad because of my boot time and the copy times within the SSD itself. Plus, all benchmarks seem on target with everything I look up online. I can return it for a replacement, though. Just can't get a refund.

Also, my 320GB HDD in the HDD setup is a 7200 RPM drive, not 5400. Unless you were referring to the 40-50mb/s one I mentioned. Pretty sure that one was a 7200 RPM as well, though. It has been fully retired. That was a very old drive from my original Windows 7 install and honestly, despite being that slow benchmark-wise there still is nothing the SSD has done that has impressed me at all in comparison to how that one used to run (in normal Windows usage, that is). I know it's popular to say how slow Windows gets over time but I've been dealing with fresh installs now, yes they're a bit faster overall but I've never seen this dramatic slow-down, personally. My old Windows 7 install booted, shutdown, and ran just fine. But, maybe I'm just used to seeing things operate at a slowed speed all the time due to my CPU.

Anyway, as I've already said before; I feel like it's just not worth this effort. I'm still amazed how every review I read has nothing but praise for this and I seem to be in my own world here. It's also my own fault for not researching this better and understanding the exact benefits and buying in to the general hype that "everything is better - you NEED this". Maybe there's just some specific thing in my setup that just won't work well with this particular SSD, doesn't change the fact that my CPU is still largely at fault for speeds in most things. Especially in the main reason I purchased the drive.

What I gather from all of this is that I would have been better off buying a tiny SSD for Windows only and benefiting from those speeds and then get a much better CPU. I'm not sure how it works using the HDD for Windows and the SSD only for storage, I haven't tried that setup at all. Don't know if there is anything else worth trying by this point, but I'll wait a little longer before I decide what to do with the drive.
 
Chaddie said:
Also, my 320GB HDD in the HDD setup is a 7200 RPM drive, not 5400. Unless you were referring to the 40-50mb/s one I mentioned. Pretty sure that one was a 7200 RPM as well, though.
Click to expand...

If that was aimed at me I was referring to the 2TB Green drive you mentioned, which is 5400.
If that was aimed at another post then disregard this one.
 
Are you swapping the drives to the same SATA ports when you do testing or are they in different ports?
 
Same ports but I have also tried different combinations as well. Each time they have been configured properly for AHCI.
 
As already mentioned, Windows caches writes. People also forget that it automatically buffers your most used programs into memory as a background task, so unless you launch 15 programs simultaneously during boot, you're not going to notice.

SSDs are useful if working on tons of small files, or if you start a lot of programs at once. Writing single larger files like you're doing makes an SSD worthless. This is even worse if you're pegging your processor compressing the thing before it's written.
 
By this point I'd just like to sell it and put whatever I get towards a CPU instead. Made a mistake in getting it in the first place. Not that it's a bad drive, but for me it really is an absolute waste of money. This whole experience has been... strange. I've learned a lot here, at least. Thanks to everyone who has tried to help with this.
 
Did you try testing with only the SSD and no hard drives connected to your PC?
 
Yes, all tests were on single drive setups only. AHCI mode was properly configured in every setup. I've done all the tests listed and many more many times over. I also know for a fact that by over-clocking and under-clocking my CPU I can get faster and slower times on nearly everything, which would indicate I'm CPU-bound. The SSD is faster in most things, namely in booting and direct copying. I just have no use for those things.
 
what is your ram capacity, timing and how many.
I realy think it's the ram that caused all of this.
beacuse after the boot you seems not having any real processing gain!
 
I own this exact drive and didn't even get it on sale and i thought it was worth every penny.....image backups/Restores complete 100 times faster...windows installs blazing quick from usb...like 10 min, windows boots up and shuts down at twice the speed at least, games load twice the speed, and the benchmarks are off the chart. Must be the rest of your system some how not being configured right or bottle necking it somehow. Take my word for it, your money was well spent on this hard drive but it just sounds like your somehow not taking full advantage of it
 
From time to time I work on a cumputer that has that very same drive and it is very fast! Loading autocad is about 1/3 or the time it takes on the hdd.

My personal experience with SSD is that you only notice and apreciate the performance diference when you go back to using a HDD! :)

Also, as said before, on a freshly installed system everything runs fast even on a HDD.
 
My system is bottle necking it, like I said earlier. I'm sure the drive is great for what it's meant to be. For me, though, boot times and program start times have never been an issue even on a very "bloated" HDD that had over four years of use on the same OS install. Before I even started all of this on my old setup Blender loaded in about 2-3 seconds, that's still roughly how long it takes everywhere. So, under ideal conditions it should load from the SSD in what, 1 second? Great, I'm sure some people appreciate that. Honestly it never bothered me and that isn't why I bought the drive.

Since my problem obviously lies with another component (the reason I can't save much faster at all) and even under best-case scenarios I wouldn't notice much of a difference in that specific task that's why I say it isn't worth it for myself. For the price I paid I could have bought a far better CPU. A better CPU would have benefited me more in both saving and nearly everything else I do, it would have been the wiser choice and it was my mistake in assuming an SSD alone improved everything. Again, I'm not saying the SSD or SSDs in general are bad or not worth it. My particular situation just happens to not benefit from this. I'm not rich. Spending $130 on a component is an investment for me.

I'm not good with RAM settings at all so I don't bother messing with them. I couldn't imagine they would be an issue but if anyone is interested in knowing the specs they should be these http://www.gskill.com/en/product/f3-10666cl9d-4gbnq. 4 sticks of 2 GB.

Unless I'm just missing the one magic thing I can do that will make this SSD improve the speed at which files compress and write to disk out of these programs then I just won't see any improvements from this.
 
btw: check this thread ;)
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1825117

Lots of happy costumers ;)

My guess is that your machine was already very fast to start with.
One of the fastest computers I work with is a 2 year old desktop on my parents house. I has a 5000rpm 2TB hdd, and that thing is really fast and snappy! It only has ms office and chrome installed though ;)
 
About the cpu upgrade, I really doubt you will see any much difference.
You have a 3.0GHz X4, assuming you get a 4ghz model it is only 33% faster...
So assuming that something that is cpu bound takes 13 seconds to complete, it will take roughlly 10 seconds with the upgraded 4GHz cpu.

Best investment is ssd, just give it time, or keep the money and save for a new system ;)
 
You probably aren't even "bottlenecked" your comparing very small proccesses that are taking a matter of seconds or tenth of seconds and comparing the two. Your probably at the limit of how quickly Windows can compute that information and most of the differences your seeing are probably within a normal margin of error.

A standard 7200RPM HDD can copy at 120-140 MBs. An SSD 350-500MBs. SSD's also excel at random access and random writes. If you are writing less than a 140MB then chances are your not going to see a difference because a second is a second and on most drives half that will fit into the cache and if you have enough system memory most apps that you use a lot will load up quick with super-fetch. Want a real test launch, move, copy, save a large file, several hundred MB or so. That's where the faster writes and reads comes in handy. If your not doing that all you will see a difference is in snappiness. Even then a decent amount of system memory in Windows 7 and 8, will minimize this.
 
M76 said:
i'm having performance doubts with 840 EVO's as well, see my older thread somewhere here. I upgraded from 830 drives, and I got less than half the performance with my write instensive applications. Coincidence?
Click to expand...

The question is, what actually is write intensive in your opinion. From my point of view, write intensive means either to often write multiple gigabytes at once or maybe 20 gigabytes per day upwards. Depending on this workload, the more sensible choice for these applications would have been the 840 Pro (I would even say the 830 is better for this), and most people here would have told you this if you asked. Once the TurboWrite buffer in the EVO is exhausted, the drive gets slower, till this buffer has been commited to normal storage. The drive needs some idle time for this. For desktop workloads this will not happen often. After all, a lot of OEMs use the 840 EVO in their devices, even Microsoft in their Surface 3 Pro. They would not do this if there is a fundamental problem with these SSDs.

Once you seek certain performance levels, you cannot rely on the marketing/spec values. Those are for very specific workloads, and if your workload is different you will get different results.
 
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I recognize the OP's predicament though I do think an SSD is essential for a fast system.

I had an old Opteron / 2005ish platform and I replaced the WD VelociRaptor w/ a SATA2 SSD and it was night and day. I could never go back to a HDD after that.

Of course the system was even faster when I later upgraded it to a Core i3, but the SSD was a necessary component as well.
 
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